I SPENT a very pleasant night at the Baronet’s—sleeping in a fine old vaulted bed-chamber, in one of the towers of his castle, from the window of which I had a command of one of the most beautiful tracts of scenery I have ever seen in Scotland. Close beneath, the narrow little glen was seen winding away with its dark woody cliffs, and the silver thread of its burn here and there glittering from under their impending masses of rock and foliage. At the far-off extremity, the glen opens into the wider valley of the larger stream, from which the whole district takes its name—of this, too, a rich peep was afforded—and its fields and woods again carried the eye gradually upwards upon the centre of a range of mountains, not unlike those over the Devil's Bridge—hoary and craggy, traced all over with the winter paths of innumerable now silent torrents.

I walked out before breakfast, and bathed in one of the pools of the burn—a beautiful round natural basin, scooped out immediately below a most picturesque waterfall, and shaded all around with such a canopy of hazels, alders, and mountain ashes, as might have fitted it to be the chosen resort of Diana and all her nymphs. Here I swam about enjoying the luxury of the clear and icy stream, till I heard a large bell ring, which I suppose was meant only to rouse the sleepers, for when I had hurried on my clothes, in the idea that its call was to breakfast, and run up the hill with an agility which nothing but my bath could have enabled me to display—I found the breakfast parlour quite deserted—not even the cloth laid. By and bye, however, the whole magnificent paraphernalia of a Scottish déjeune were brought in—the family assembled from their several chambers—and we fell to work in high style. In addition to the usual articles, we had strawberries, which the Scots eat with an enormous quantity of cream—and, of course, a glass of good whisky was rendered quite excuseable, in the eyes of a medical man, by this indulgence.